The Guadalajara Reporter

A chilled, rainy winter tests teenager’s judgement and skills in a muddy, slippery and dangerous mountainside challenge  

An unseasonable biting wind brought sleety rains, mornings that put rubbery rims of ice on horse troughs, and harried rural residents of Jalisco’s mountainsides.

That was November and December of what people called ”the cold year” in the early 1960’s.  Concha Rosales, in her mythical 16th year, was on her gelding, Lobo, squinting into the sleet for a missing cow and calf.  As usual, she had risen early to grind nixtamal – lime-water-softened kernels of corn – on a metate (mortar) shaped from a piece of rough volcanic mountain basalt.  When she stepped into the wind-blown drizzle for her necesidades, Concha noticed the cow with a new calf was missing.

Concha stepped back inside the adobe house to feed more leña to night fire, enlarging it into the morning’s cooking fire.  Her older male siblings were supposed to maintain the night fire, but often they let it die.  Concha had taken on that chore.  She was a sleepwalker, something that worried Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, who had secretly, unofficially, adopted her.  Gathering kindling and cooking were traditional tasks for women. By the time Concha was eight, she surprised her family by carrying a well-filled child-sized trump-line of kindling.

Knowing what occurred when wet, cold and windy weather hit scattered mountain settlements, I drove in the darkness up the slippery wagon-wide brecha to the Rosaleses.  Chema, Lupe and their relatives lived in a loose cluster of dwellings: a mix of adobe casas, whose tile roofs began to leak during long-run storms, as did those of the more fragile thatch-roofed and wattle-sided jacales.  By this time in the storm everyone would begin to be running out of dry leña.  There thick forests of pino, palo avellana (Hazelnut), picea (spruce), guaje (acacia) furnished ample supplies of fire wood. But everything was rain-soaked by now.  It would have to be dried by placing stacks near indoor fires.  But to quickly dry wood for leña none of it could be large chopped pieces of tree trunks.

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